Description

The intention, Walter Kerr writes, has been to make the play sound as it might have sounded to an average Athenian sitting in a popular comic theatre. As Kerr, describes the work: The Birds (414 B.C.) was Aristophanes’ first Utopian play. In this instance, he has his ‘comedy team’ leave Athens, fed up with the frauds and bores of that society, in an effort to found a better society among the birds. To do so, they must first locate Epops, King of the Birds, who was once a man like themselves and who might be expected to know both sides of the problem. How they find him and what they persuade him to do is the body of the play. The first act concerns the founding of Cloud Cuckooland and its triumph over all earthly quacks. The second concerns its triumph over the polytheistic absurdities to which Athenian religion had been reduced. One ext. set.